Globalization and its Impact on Contemporary Culture

• Author: Alexandru-Corneliu Arion
• Position: Deacon Lecturer PhD, Chair of History and Philosophy of Religions, Faculty of Theology, 'Valahia'University, Târgoviste, Romania
• Pages: 347-354

Globalization and Cultural Diversity

347

Globalization and its Impact on Contemporary Culture

Alexandru-Corneliu Arion

1

Abstract: For the last decades, the contemporary society is fussed, inter alia, by globalization. Globalization

has inevitably a cultural dimension and a religious one. More than material indicators, the cultural factor can

be considered a pivotal one to globalization. The main features of global culture are: lack of memory,

universality, uniform technical basis, lack of historical background. There is nowadays a globalization of

culture in the sense of complex connexity. Globalization is examined in relation to economy, to technologies

(especially with the computerized ones). However, in its essence, globalization renders the state of our world

in its entirety. And what this process reveals to us is the fact that man became truly homo universalae. The

cultural dimension of globalization is unquestionable and more th an material coordinates it can be considered

a fundamental one of globalization. Globalization lies is the center of modern culture; there are cultural

practices which affect the way we understand what culture really means in the modern world. In the context

of globalizing scale discussions, the question is whether global modernity gives us a global culture as well.

That because many concede that such a culture does not yet exist and probably will never exist. However, it

can be ar gued that there is already such a culture, as anthropologist Ulf Hannerz expressed it already in the

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Keywords: globalization; culture; society; identity; trends; politics, economy

1. Preliminaries

The world we live in is still so strongly rooted in hedonistic materialism. In such world, man devoid

of roots (Popescu, 2001), has become estranged from God and the idolatry of consumption along

with ideologies is the leitmotif of everyday life. Likewise, inclination towards the bodily, the desert of

passions and the pride that disfigure human face distort the lives of many. (The passage of the

European world, from medieval to the modern era or the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century

entailed considerable mutations on the European culture scene. From God the focus has shifted to

human, from Theology passed on to science and from spiritual values has moved to material ones, as

so many expressions of secular culture.) The autonomous man, proclaimed by the Enlightenment, is

imagining himself alone in the world with his powers which, in the long run prove to be nothing but

impotencies of late outcome and only this delay may explain the illusion that blind, in all ages, the

mighty men of the world. (B)

For a while now, the contemporary world is worried, inter alia, of globalization. Outstanding

intellectuals, from Alvin Toffler (The Third Wave), to Francis Fukuyama (The End of History), Jürgen

Habermas (Theory of communicative action) and Marshall McLuhan (Global Village) have placed the

phenomenon in the ideological movement or information progress area, into knowledge-based

society. In Romania, the discussion reached to the point especially under Euro-Atlantic integration

form, minorities and privatization becoming the headlines of public life.

1 Deacon Lecturer PhD

Romania, Address:   Romania, Tel.: +40 0245 206101/ fax + 40 0245 217 692. Corresponding

author: free99ind@yahoo.com.