In the past few days, the New York Times has run three articles—In Suez Canal, Stuck Ship Is a Warning About Excessive Globalization by Peter S. Goodman, Why the World’s Container Ships Grew So Big by Nirja Chokshi, and The Stuck Container Ship on the Suez Canal Was a Metaphor by Marc Levinson—all claiming that the plight of the good ship Ever Given “proves” that all this globalism stuff is a lot of hooey. But despite their best efforts, all their finely crafted metaphors leave them, well, stuck on a sand bar, the sand bar of truth.
Isn’t the fact that this is, you know, the first time in memory that the Suez Canal, or any other major canal, has been stopped for an appreciable time the “real story”? That this sort of thing almost never happens, rather than that it happened once? Messrs. Goodman, Chokshi, and Levinson more closely resemble a trio of cats fascinated by a laser pointer than thinking human beings.
Because everyone wants to hop on the populist bandwagon, to prove that that they haven’t sold out to the rootless cosmopolitan billionaires who rape the land and impoverish the people. In fact, globalization has been one of the most desirable and admirable events in human history, moving billions of human beings out of poverty, rather than helpless slaves to a dull and ultimately murderous routine, to live lives that, 150 years ago, were reserved for at most 10% of the population, the great resources of western science and free enterprise finally being turned to the benefit of the non-western world.
To say that globalization has proved “disruptive” is putting it mildly. The reaction against it, from Trump to Modi to Xi Jinping, is testimony to the magnitude of the change. But none of the “trends” vaguely decried in the three pieces published by the Times are going to slacken. The tensions created by this rapidly transforming world, where capital is liquid but human beings often absurdly “sticky”, will not be resolved by wishing that we could somehow “go back”, go back to a time when only the West was “advanced” and millions and millions of people outside it spent twelve-hour days wading in rice paddies fertilized with human excrement.
