Not the end, but a beginning

Pandemic has promoted the transition from trade globalization to tech totalism

The COVID-19 is a human tragedy. There is no denying that. The repercussions for every sector of life are proving to be profound.

Indeed some commentators have announced that this is the end of globalization. Well, for a start, I would say that underestimates the impact of COVID-19. It is more than the end of something, it is a beginning.

For relations at a distance are still social, indeed some come much closer to the true sense of being social. We are reaching out to other human beings who could be anywhere in the world in the vivid and renewed recognition that we all belong to a single vulnerable biological species that ultimately has only science between itself and extinction.

This is the world society of the human species as it extends worldwide not simply through the overlapping linkages of neighboring communities, which have always been a fact of life, but because each one of us has a real or potential link with someone else, no matter how far we are apart. The virus means we sustain our relations with our family and friends even as it forces us to keep our distance from them.

By emphasizing absence it is a paradox that the virus illuminates with still greater clarity the nature of human society. Physical contact or proximity is not its essence, even if it provides the necessary condition for human reproduction (at least up until in vitro fertilization).

It therefore appears at first glance more than a little strange that many commentators have remarked that COVID-19 means the end of globalization. What they mainly have in mind is an idea of globalization that is restricted largely to the economic sphere, and in particular to free trade between nations.

But trade between countries is not everything in the global economy. When the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a special report on globalization in 1993 it emphasized transnational firms, jumping over tariff boundaries. People migrate to find jobs. They take their tastes with them. Culture and communication are even more global than trade.

Perhaps we should be talking about the globalization of knowledge. The currents that carry globalization forward are fundamentally cultural, the spread of ideas and knowledge in particular, especially in and through science and technology. National boundaries can do little to prevent the spread of knowledge and indeed today the quest for a vaccine for the virus is a shared effort across the globe, where the claims to ownership are insignificant compared with the vast fund of shared knowledge that is at the disposal of all medical scientists from every nation.

Globalization goes on all the time. What does not happen is a reduction in the diversity of life and differences between cultures. What does not happen is a march to the same destination. There is no single outcome, but there is the continuing experience of multiple cultures in the same place.

Technologies of communication have brought the possibility of knowing what is happening to one's closest and dearest even when they are on another continent. They allow us to talk of events in far off places. They span the world, but the radical novelty in the response to the virus is they penetrate the intimate spaces of personal life.

This effect is total in its pervasiveness and extent, beyond anything the prophets of globalization could have imagined. This is totalization, something other than globalization, distinct in its origin and in its penetration, for each individual.

The virus has brought the total dimension to global society. To understand this we really have to be clear in our minds what the difference is between global and total. Global, since its rise in general use since World War II, refers to the shared fate of our species. Total means that every aspect of individual and collective life comes under scrutiny and control.

We count, inspect and gather all the individual items together to get the total sum. When we go global we encompass everything. The total penetrates whatever there is, the global expands to ensure nothing is left out.

COVID-19 has brought the first "total-global" moment, one unprecedented in human experience, so far as we know from recorded history. World wars have been approximations to it, but even they have not had the comprehensive impact that the virus is having on daily life around the world.

Many say that nothing will ever be the same again. In the immediate shock of the outbreak that may seem to be the case. But the two world wars lasted very much longer than the pandemic has up to now and the world recovered from those for the global population to triple-a double-edged achievement of course.

Many of the changes will come from the added impetus to the advance of communication technology precisely because it operates to intensify both the total and the global. Rivalry between states, competition between corporations, individual aspirations for contact and knowledge all add up to the comprehensive digitalization of everyday life.

Whether this relentless advance of technology will actually assist or imperil the future of humankind is a question that remains to be answered after the crisis of the pandemic has passed. Our best hope is that we learn lessons from the experience that can be put to good use in averting the worst consequences of climate change. The total may yet help the global.

The author is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK, and the author of China's Role in a Shared Human Future: Towards Theory for Global Leadership. The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.