THE LEXUS AND THE OLIVE TREE
UNDERSTANDING GLOBALIZATION
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX 1999
PART II
Chapter 3: … And the walls came Tumbling Down
Chapter 4: Microchip Immune Deficiency
Chapter 5: The Golden Straitjacket
Chapter 6: The Electronic Herd
PART TWO: PLUGGING INTO THE SYSTEM
Chapter 7: DOScapital 6.0
Chapter 8: Globalution
Chapter 9: Buy Taiwan, Hold Italy, Sell France
Chapter 10: The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention
Chapter 11: Demolition Man
Chapter 12: Winners Take All
PART THREE: THE BACKLASH AGAINST THE SYSTEM
Chapter 13: The Backlash
Chapter 14: The Groundswell (Or the Backlash Against the backlash)
PART FOUR: AMERICA AND THE SYSTEM
Chapter 15: Rational Exuberance
Chapter 16: Revolution Is U.S.
Chapter 17: If You Want to Speak to a Human Being, Press 1
Chapter 18: There Is a Way Forward
• In the winter of 1996, I accompanied then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright on a trip to the war zones of Africa where UN peacekeepers were deployed…..
• America does have a shared national interest to pursue in today’s globalization system, and it has an enormous role to play….
Politics for the age of globalization
Geo-economics for the Age of Globalization
The Geopolitics of Globalization
Olive Trees and Globalization
• But even if we can get the right politics, geopolitics and geo-economics for sustainable globalization, there is another, almost intangible, set of policies that needs to be kept in mind. It involves recognizing the olive-tree needs in all of us and making certain those are being protected as well.
• That is why I began this book with a discussion of Cain and Abel and I will end it with a discussion of the Tower of Babel.
• What was the problem with the Tower of Babel? Isn’t it what globalizers dream about today – a world in which we all speak the same language, have the same currency, follow the same accounting practices?
• It is precisely their sameness which allowed the people of the world in biblical times to cooperate and build that Tower of Babel – to build a tower that might actually reach to the heavens.
• The Internet is a sort of universal language outside the bounds of any particular culture. It is a universal mode of communication that, at least on the surface, seems to make us all intelligible to one another, even if we don’t all speak the same language. And it allows us to connect with all sorts of people with whom we never shared an olive grove.
• But what did God do with the Tower of Babel? He put a stop to it. And how did he put a stop to it? By making the people all speak different languages so they could no longer cooperate.
• Rabbi Tzvi Marx explains it like this:
“God did it in part because He felt that the people were trying to transcend their own human limitations in building a tower to the heavens, in a way that might challenge Him. But He also destroyed the tower because He felt that their common language and approach was ultimately dehumanizing. It denied all particularity in men and women in favor of a universal language and a universal project. And therefore God’s solution and his punishment was to stop the tower by making all the people speak different languages.”
It was God’s way of getting people back in touch with, and in balance with, their olive trees, which reflect their own individuality and their particular links to a place, a community, a culture, a tribe and a family.
Yes, globalization and the Internet can bring together people who have never been connected before – like my mom and her French Internet bridge partners. But rather than creating new kinds of communities, this technology often just creates a false sense of connection and intimacy. It’s like two beepers communicating with one another. Can we really connect with others through E-mail or Internet bridge or chat rooms? Or is all this standardizing technology just empowering us to reach farther into the world without exempting us from the real work required to build relationships and community with the folks next door? I used to chat with and meet people from all over the world while riding the ski lifts up the mountains in Colorado. I still ride the lifts, but now everyone has a cellular phone. So, instead of meeting people from all over the world on the lifts, now I just overhear their conversations on their cellular phones with their offices all over the world. I really hate that. E-mail is not building a community – attending a PTA meeting is. A chat room is not building a community – working with your neighbors to petition city hall for a new road is. Can we really build cybercommunities that will replace real communities? I’m very dubious. That’s why I, for one, won’t be surprised if I wake up one day and discover that the Almighty has made the Internet crash just the way He did the Tower of Babel.
• Balancing a Lexus with an olive tree is something every society has to work on every day. It is also what America, at its best, is all about.
• America at its best takes the needs of markets, individuals and communities all utterly seriously. And that’s why America, at its best, is not just a country. It’s a spiritual value and role model.
• It’s a nation that is not afraid to go to the moon, but also still loves to come home for Little League. It is the nation that invented both cyberspace and the backyard barbecue, the Internet and the social safety net, the SEC and the ACLU.
• These dialectics are at the heart of America, and they should never be resolved in favor of one over the other. But they also should never be taken for granted.
• They have to be constantly nurtured, tended to and preserved – and we can do this by supporting our public schools, paying our taxes, understanding that government is not the enemy and always making sure we’re still getting to know our neighbors over the fence and not over the Web.
• A healthy global society is one that can balance the Lexus and the olive tree all the time, and there is no better model for this on earth today than America. That’s why I believe so strongly that for globalization to be sustainable America must be at its best – today, tomorrow, all the time. It not only can be, it must be, a beacon for the whole world. Let us not squander this precious legacy.