Fragmentation

I think that often we forget about the cultural and social implications of globalization. We are quick to praise the advances in technology and communication and hail this new era of global trade and cooperation as world economies grow to sizes never before even imagined. Of course all this as the potential to bring about an equally unimagined enormity of good as the human race becomes a more and more tightly knit family, yet as we create the human family it is important to remember that families are based on certain principles which determine their success. It is therefore most crucial that the correct principles are set in order for this world family to succeed. One needs not look very far to see the commonly accepted, unacceptable failure of so many families throughout the world today. (By unacceptable here, I refer to the horrifically high rate of family failure and by no means do I wish to communicate that the failure of an individual family is unacceptable.) If the members of our global family have such a difficult time holding their own immediate families together it becomes even more crucial that we set the correct principles as the foundation for our global family and that we stick to them rigorously.

With that said, I do not wish here to discuss what those principles are, but rather I would like to point out upon which road, it seems to me, globalization is traveling.

It seems, or I have not heard much spoken about, the effects of globalization on culture and human relations. So, what is the effect?

Almost every country in the world now watched American movies and listens to American music. Of course there are other movie and music industries, especially the European entertainment industry, but can we deny that they are all inextricably linked, feeding off each other, highly influenced by the American entertainment culture and moving toward the same destination?

My observation is that almost all cultures around the world are moving toward the same American entertainment culture. In other words Hollywood and the American entertainment industry is shaping every culture around the world into whatever culture they choose. Most especially in the US and I would say in all European based cultures, media is the ruling force. Everything is about media. We even work to earn money to spend on entertainment which is largely media based. This influence by itself is not a bad thing, especially if it creates a wholesome, healthy world culture, but the real question is, “What kind of culture is it creating?” for this is the foundational principle on which the world family rests.

I do not wish to discuss the horrific music which permeates the radio waves which saturate the air, nor do I wish to discuss in much detail the movies and tv shows being exported from studios. If we briefly look at a typical movie, and let’s say a nice G rated romantic comedy which seems to have as its most dangerous quality the power to provide a warm, fuzzy feeling for girls and a cozy nap for guys, yet what actually takes place in the movie? Guy meets girl, guy likes girl, they go on a fun date, they sleep together, they fight about something, they resolve it and then they live happily ever after. Sound about right?

How many real life relationships follow this pattern?

Elder Holland speaks of moral debauchery:

“You must wait--you must wait until you can give everything, and you cannot give everything until you are at least legally and, for Latter-day Saint purposes, eternally pronounced as one. To give illicitly that which is not yours to give (remember--"you are not your own") and to give only part of that which cannot be followed with the gift of your whole heart and your whole life and your whole self is its own form of emotional Russian roulette. If you persist in sharing part without the whole, in pursuing satisfaction devoid of symbolism, in giving parts and pieces and inflamed fragments only, you run the terrible risk of such spiritual, psychic damage that you may undermine both your physical intimacy and your wholehearted devotion to a truer, later love. You may come to that moment of real love, of total union, only to discover to your horror that what you should have saved has been spent, and--mark my words--only God's grace can recover that piecemeal dissipation of your virtue.

A good Latter-day Saint friend, Dr. Victor L. Brown, Jr., has written of this issue:

Fragmentation enables its users to counterfeit intimacy. . . .

If we relate to each other in fragments, at best we miss full relationships. At worst, we manipulate and exploit others for our gratification. Sexual fragmentation can be particularly harmful because it gives powerful physiological rewards which, though illusory, can temporarily persuade us to overlook the serious deficits in the overall relationship. Two people may marry for physical gratification and then discover that the illusion of union collapses under the weight of intellectual, social, and spiritual incompatibilities. . . .

Sexual fragmentation is particularly harmful because it is particularly deceptive. The intense human intimacy that should be enjoyed in and symbolized by sexual union is counterfeited by sensual episodes which suggest--but cannot deliver--acceptance, understanding, and love. Such encounters mistake the end for the means as lonely, desperate people seek a common denominator which will permit the easiest, quickest gratification. [Victor L. Brown, Jr., Human Intimacy: Illusion and Reality (Salt Lake City, Utah: Parliament Publishers, 1981), pp. 5-6]

Listen to a far more biting observation by a non-Latter-day Saint regarding such acts devoid of both the soul and symbolism we have been discussing. He writes:

Our sexuality has been animalized, stripped of the intricacy of feeling with which human beings have endowed it, leaving us to contemplate only the act, and to fear our impotence in it. It is this animalization from which the sexual manuals cannot escape, even when they try to do so, because they are reflections of it. They might [as well] be textbooks for veterinarians. [Fairlie, Seven Deadly Sins, p. 182]”

This of course refers to sexual relations, but I have no qualms about generalizing this to all cultural aspects of human relations. I feel like we live in a fragmented counterfeit culture. We make jokes about the US not having a culture because we say it is inferior and below our sophisticated European culture, but the sad news is that, it seems to me, this culture that is over running the world is in fact not a culture at all. (I do not wish this to be thought of an attack against American culture because it is not, I refer to the culture portrayed by the entertainment industry) The absence of culture here is that the culture precipitated by the entertainment industry is fiction. It portrays a culture that does not exist, nor can exist because it is only fragmental. And this is the culture taking over the world.

As an aside, it seems to me, that the culture in which I grew up in South Africa no longer exists. With the “liberation” of the country and the advancements in global entertainment over the last 10 year which we take for granted, it seems that the now rising generation behind me has been indoctrinated with this same Hollywood culture as the rest of the world. I feel as if the culture which I grew up in and loved has disappeared.

The world now seeks out the fragments (especially sexual) which are portrayed through media which they believe to be, as stated above, acceptance, understanding, love, but find that they are not.

That’s what I wanted to say and I wish people would become more aware of this and do something about it in the own lives that will take them from fragmented pieces of an incomplete unhappiness to a full, enriched, complete happiness.

Copyright © 2008 by Layne Cockcroft

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