Jean Baudrillard
The dominance of globalization and terrorism: Jean Baudrillard's argument on 'unequal returns'
In the essay "The Violence of the Global," social scientist Jean Baudrillard argued and analyzed about the emergence of terrorism and its gradual prevalence in the period of globalization. In analyzing the current state of socio-political affairs among nations of the world, he came to the conclusion that the prevalence of terrorism was directly linked with globalization. Globalization, meanwhile, was also linked to the universalization of virtues and norms that have prevailed in modern society, specifically American society, for centuries. Universalization, globalization, and terrorism were thus linked together through Baudrillard's theory on 'unequal returns,' an occurrence throughout the human history that eventually led to a violent response, thereby resulting to wars and in the case of the present period, terrorism.
Baudrillard's discourse posits two important generalizations relating the three concepts enumerated earlier (universalization, globalization, and terrorism). The first assertion that he claimed was that the death, or rather, the suicide of universalization was due to the emergence and eventual dominance of globalization in the modern to post-modern societies. The second assertion that he discussed in the essay was that, due to the 'unequal return' of the opportunities given to the West by the Enlightenment -- that is, usage of these positive effects of the Enlightenment and modernism without giving these benefits to other societies in return -- societies that have learned to cultivate an anti-universal social culture have later resorted to acts of violence against United States through terrorism.
In analyzing these two assertions presented by Baudrillard, it is essential to discuss how the age of Enlightenment is linked to the emergence of both universalization and globalization. Baudrillard connects the Enlightenment to universalization based on the principles that composes the latter -- "human rights, liberty, culture, and democracy." These important concepts associated with the Enlightenment gave birth to modernism, the period wherein unparalleled intellectual and social developments occurred. The Enlightenment contributed to the emergence of universalization of norms and virtues because it established human rights, liberty, culture, and democracy as the foundation of new modern societies that...
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