Page 330 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

O r t h o d o x y
Cultural Identity
in the Age of Globalization
Having examined the inner logic of globalization, we must
now turn to its most sensitive consequence: the question
of cultural identity.
There is a widespread fear that globalization threatens to erase
cultural particularities and impose a single, uniform culture. Yet
this fear is not entirely well founded. Globalization, grounded in
the language of freedom and individual rights, does not impose
culture by force. Rather, it affects cultures more subtly: it weak-
ens those that have already lost their inner vitality.
A culture that is no longer lived deeply becomes reduced to
folklore. And folklore poses no threat to globalization. On the
contrary, it can be easily absorbed, transformed into something
decorative, even commodified—an object of consumption with-
in the global market. In this way, cultural particularities are pre-
served only as surface expressions, detached from the living
ethos that once sustained them.
Globalization becomes truly troubled only when a cultural
identity resists its fundamental principles. Any worldview that
does not reduce knowledge to utility, or life to productivity and
consumption, stands in tension with it. But where such princi-
ples have already been accepted, what identity remains to be
threatened?
We must therefore ask: what is cultural identity? If we look
more closely, we can discern certain fundamental elements.
Language is indeed a basic component of identity. Yet it is not
threatened by disappearance so much as by impoverishment.
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