Globalization. Huge topic. Huge and also very popular. Everybody speaks about it. It's spoken and discussed, but who really
know which are its causes, its origins?
For approaching the argument in the most accurate way, we should start speaking about a remote and ancient society, which was based in some part of the world - which was maybe not the Western world.
We could think about Babylon, Damasco, Rome, Byzantium, and what other ancient cosmopolitan metropolis our imagination would bring to. But thinking about it, it' not enough.
We should think to the
institutions that these civilizations have built. Institutions which were representative of the beliefs of the people. They had human institutions which had to provide to human needs: the cult, the commerce, the social assistance.
At a certain point of their growing, it happened that the commerce with foreign people needed to be ruled, and this brought to a developed
credit system. They invented the banks, which helped to negotiate affairs, and also they invented regulation to give order and legitimate the ways to make business.
At that point, the business was not business only for money: everything was founded on a human institution, because every institution has a human face. A man was a man, before being a business-man.
Then, centuries changed the face of this man. Now we say that the institutions have been "secularised". They have lost and forgotten their ancient foundation, because the formal rationality of their function prevails on their original meaning. Important historians of economy like Max Weber and Werner Sombart have remarked this fact.
Now we can just imagine, but in a slight way, which will be the destiny of the development that we have so far stopped to handle. Nowadays, it's the own development that's handling us. We are not the owners of the institutions, but the institutions live their own life, so they grow and change their form, and also they move us to change our attitude in relating with them. Institutions are our leaders: and money is a such important institution. All the banking and credit system is an institution that has totally forgotten its original meaning, in order to become more rational. We should think more about the myth of rationality, which is praised by contemporary scientists and theorists of new and positive society.
Of course we don't face reality with any pessimism. We just have to not forget the ancient scores of the past, the heritage which is hidden and located inside the still-living institutions, which is revelead sometimes to us, when we try to understand "Why" the ancient civilizations men did something that looks to us as not comprehensible. They simply had not our idea of rationality, which is for sure the religious idea of modern man.