(2017-12-22) 2018 The Year Of Global Creolization

Venkatesh Rao: 2018: The Year of Global Creolization

In 2018, we'll be entering the final, hardest-fought fourth phase of globalization: global creolization. The two-year transition we've just experienced is remarkable primarily for one thing: the degree to which the massive global ethnonationalist reaction has largely failed to slow or halt the process of continued global political, economic, and cultural integration

Linguistic anthropologists distinguish between two phases of language evolution due to cultural contact. In the early phase, a pidgin forms. A pidgin is a zombie language, a clumsy mashup that lacks the organic coherence and harmonized aesthetics of a real language. In a generation or two, however, as cultural contact is continued, a creole appears, creating an integrated language with a living energy to it, an elan vital (that might be favorite phrase of the year).

The sociological concept is the classic mechanical versus organic solidarity, due to Emile Durkheim. Mechanical solidarity is how peoples who share a culture (Arabs for example) form supra-tribal polities. Organic solidarity, which requires impersonal institutions and strong division of labor/specialization, is how people who do not share a culture, but have specialized in complementary ways that foster productive interdependence, form supra-tribal polities.

The big thought is this: you can think of globalization as a four-phase process, and we're entering the last phase, global creolization (I'll let you mull the previous stages and transitions with the help of the 2x2). It is a condition where the transition from mechanical to organic solidarity on both political-economic (x-axis) and cultural (y-axis) fronts has progressed far enough that cultural creolization has started to happen in earnest. Ugly-duckling pidgin, zombie cosmopolitanism is starting to get supplanted by creolized, living-swan cosmopolitanism.